What?

The DBpedia + BBC Combo Linked Dataset is a preconfigured Virtuoso Cluster (4 Virtuoso Cluster Nodes, each comprised of one Virtuoso Instance; initial deployment is to a single Cluster Host, but license may be converted for physically distributed deployment), available via the Amazon EC2 Cloud, preloaded with the following datasets:

Why?

The BBC has been publishing Linked Data from its WebData Space for a number of years. In line with best practices for injecting Linked Data into the World Wide Web (Web), the BBC datasets are interlinked with other datasets such as DBpedia and MusicBrainz.

Typical follow-your-nose exploration using a Web Browser (or even via sophisticated SPARQL query crawls) isn't always practical once you get past the initial euphoria that comes from comprehending the Linked Data concept. As your queries get more complex, the overhead of remote sub-queries increases its impact, until query results take so long to return that you simply give up.

Thus, maximizing the effects of the BBC's efforts requires Linked Data that shares locality in a Web-accessible Data Space — i.e., where all Linked Data sets have been loaded into the same data store or warehouse. This holds true even when leveraging SPARQL-FED style virtualization — there's always a need to localize data as part of any marginally-decent locality-aware cost-optimization algorithm.

This DBpedia + BBC dataset, exposed via a preloaded and preconfigured Virtuoso Cluster, delivers a practical point of presence on the Web for immediate and cost-effective exploitation of Linked Data at the individual and/or service specific levels.

How?

To work through this guide, you'll need to start with 90 GB of free disk space. (Only 41 GB will be consumed after you delete the installer archives, but starting with 90+ GB ensures enough work space for the installation.)

Set key environment variables and start the OpenLink License Manager, using command (this may vary depending on your shell and install directory):

. /opt/virtuoso/virtuoso-enterprise.sh

Optional: To keep the default single-server configuration file and demo database intact, set the VIRTUOSO_HOME environment variable to a different directory, e.g.,

export VIRTUOSO_HOME=/opt/virtuoso/cluster-home/

Note: You will have to adjust this setting every time you shift between this cluster setup and your single-server setup. Either may be made your environment's default through the virtuoso-enterprise.sh and related scripts.

Set up your cluster by running the mkcluster.sh script. Note that initial deployment of the DBpedia + BBC Combo requires a 4 node cluster, which is the default for this script.